“Jefferson, stop!” the captain yelled.
But Jefferson wasn’t taking orders from him anymore. The vampire opened his mouth and bent over Captain Weber’s neck.
“No!” Tim cried.
He ran at Jefferson, lunging with the wooden stake. Jefferson twisted, and the stake’s sharp point only grazed his arm. Enraged, he bounced the captain’s head off the helm. Captain Weber went down, and Jefferson sprang for Tim, pulling him off his feet. The bucket fell out of his hand and landed on the deck. The coolant inside sloshed precariously against the sides.
“You shouldn’t have come out of your hidey-hole, Spicer,” Jefferson said. “Now your sorry ass is mine!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jerry hobbled slowly across the torpedo room, holding on to the torpedo trays for support. He couldn’t put any weight on the smashed knee, or the excruciating pain would drop him to the deck. And if he fell again, he wasn’t sure he would ever get back up. He maneuvered himself out of the torpedo-room hatch, grunting with pain as he stepped over the raised lip at the bottom. In the corridor outside, he found that leaning against the bulkhead as he walked helped some.
He paused at the foot of the main ladder. He dreaded the thought of hauling himself up with a broken knee, but he couldn’t stay down here alone. He took a deep breath and put his hands on the highest rung he could reach, then pulled himself up enough to hop up with his good leg on the bottom rung. Then he repeated the process, getting both hands on the next rung and hopping up. The dragging leg hurt like hell, but by now everything did.
Normally, he would have climbed the ten-foot ladder to the middle level in a couple of seconds. Now it took him nearly three excruciating minutes. When at last he pulled himself up onto the middle level, he lay on the deck, breathing hard. He glanced up at the reactor-room hatch a few short feet away and thought about calling for help, but it was unlikely anyone who was still inside would hear him through the thick steel and over the engine noise. He was going to have to bang on the hatch if he wanted anyone to know he was out here. Gritting his teeth, he began to pull himself along the coolant-slick deck.
Shouts of alarm from the control room above made him pause. Then came a scream and the sound of someone crashing into a piece of equipment.
Shit!
He turned around and used the ladder to pull himself up onto his good leg. Bracing for more pain, he started up the rungs, using the same method as before. By now, he was perspiring heavily.
It felt like an eternity before he reached the top of the ladder. He pulled himself onto the top level and tried to stand, but with the broken knee his balance was shot. He managed to get up on his good leg while leaning against the bulkhead. At the end of the short corridor that led away from the ladder, he could see that the control room had been rigged for red. They had battle lanterns too—lots of them, from the look of it—and enough light bled into the ladder space that he should be able to find the bucket of coolant he had left there. But it was gone.
He heard three gunshots and then another scream. Shit! There was no time to waste. He hobbled away from the ladder, toward the control room. In the short corridor between the two, he found a dropped wooden stake on the deck. He bent down painfully and picked it up. He didn’t know what he could do in his condition, except maybe die. But if he had to die, he was sure as hell going to take one of those bloodsucking assholes down with him.
CHAPTER FORTY
Alive, Lieutenant Commander Jefferson had been a strong man—big, muscular, fit—but now, after his unholy transformation, his strength was astonishing. He held Tim up off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. Jefferson’s lips peeled back to reveal long, sharp fangs that glistened in the red light. It didn’t matter how much Tim struggled, punched, or kicked—Jefferson wouldn’t be deterred from biting into his neck and drinking his fill.
Captain Weber, dazed but back on his feet, rushed Jefferson from behind and tried to pull him off Tim. And, of course, Jefferson didn’t budge. But he did release Tim before swatting the captain away like a bothersome fly.
Tim scrambled for the bucket of radioactive water, but Jefferson was too fast. He grabbed Tim and tossed him across the room as easily as he had tossed Captain Weber.
Tim collided with the dead body in the planesman’s station, then fell, banging his head on the metal base of the seat. For a moment, the whole room spun like a carousel. It took him a second to snap out of it. When he did, he saw LeMon and Jefferson moving like lightning through the red-lit control room, slaughtering sailors and smashing battle lanterns.
Terrified, Tim began to crawl along the deck on all fours. A hand grabbed him by the wrist, and he recoiled.
“It’s me,” Oran whispered.
Tim relaxed a degree. Earlier, LeMon had smashed Oran into the fire-control console so hard that Tim had thought the culinary specialist was down for the count. He glanced up and saw Jefferson shove a sailor against the bulkhead and tear into the screaming man’s throat with his teeth.
“We gotta get back to the reactor room,” Oran said. “They’re killin’ us, Spicer. We need a new plan!”
“The captain won’t go for it, and we can’t just abandon him,” Tim said.
Oran’s grip on Tim’s wrist slipped as the Cajun was yanked roughly away. LeMon had him by the leg. Oran cried out as his brother threw him hard against the deck.
“Gonna taste your blood now, brother,” LeMon said. “Better’n Ma’s étouffée.”
Shit. Tim stayed down, crawling across the deck on all fours toward the bucket, avoiding the fallen bodies in his way, old dead and new. He tried not to look at them. Their throats were open and bleeding, their faces locked in expressions of pain and terror. The irradiated water was their only chance. Something grabbed him in the dark, lifted him, and spun him around. Disoriented, he smacked into a bank of small, twinkling equipment lights. His face collided with a metal panel and he slid to the deck, dazed. Jefferson loomed over him. This is it, Tim thought. The end. He had tried to be a good sailor for the navy. He had tried to be a good crewman for Captain Weber. He had tried to be a good friend to men like Mitch Robertson and Jerry White. There was so much more he wished he could have done, so many more parts of the world he wished he could have seen. Now none of that was going to happen. He braced himself and waited for Jefferson’s teeth to tear into him.
Jefferson bent down to bite him. Tim spotted the bucket nearby and sprang desperately for it, but Jefferson planted a foot in his back so hard he thought his spine would snap. He was pinned to the deck.
Jefferson laughed. “You’ve got some fight in you, Spicer. That’ll make killing you all the sweeter.”
Across the control room, LeMon straddled Oran on the deck while fighting off a handful of sailors who were trying to stop him from tearing into his brother’s neck. Captain Weber picked up a dropped stake and lunged at LeMon. He stabbed, but LeMon twisted, and Weber missed his heart, punching through the left shoulder instead. LeMon hissed with rage and pulled the stake out, but it was enough of a distraction for Oran to struggle free. LeMon rose to his feet and tossed the stake aside. Oran grabbed Captain Weber and pulled him away, then ran for the bucket. He snatched it up by the bail and spun around with it.
LeMon sprang as Oran flung the contents of the bucket onto him, water and plastic soup bowls alike. The bowls bounced and clattered to the deck as the coolant splashed over him in a wave.